The last 10 years have been a challenging journey. We tried something new with our commercial venture, Synergy 2 and it flopped. We then bounced back

Search code, repositories, users, issues, pull requests...

submited by
Style Pass
2024-09-16 15:00:03

The last 10 years have been a challenging journey. We tried something new with our commercial venture, Synergy 2 and it flopped. We then bounced back with Synergy 3 which has been a hit with paying customers, but it's left our open source community asking: "What about Synergy 1?"

I'm glad to say that development of Synergy 1 is still important to us. Crucial, in fact. This is not just because Synergy 3 depends on the open-source code of Synergy 1 (it uses the Core component; server and client) but also because we are an open-source company at our foundation. Synergy 3 is just a friendly wrapper around Synergy 1, where the real magic still happens. The Synergy 3 GUI is proprietary now, but that may change.

We have made the mistake of neglecting our open-source community while we focused on the new GUI. As a result, many new Synergy-derived forks have popped up over the last decade, each with their re-imagining of not only the Synergy logo but an investment of significant effort into improving the Synergy-like source code.

Barrier, sadly, came and went. Though it is dead now, its message rings clear: we weren't managing the Synergy community properly. Then came Barrier's descendant, Input Leap (a Synergy-derivative). I would like to take a moment here to commend the developers who have invested significant effort into all Synergy-derived forks, efforts that have led to significant improvements in Synergy 1 Community Edition. Developers such as Peter Hutterer (@whot), the primary developer of Wayland support for Synergy-like apps, have made leaps that benefit not only Synergy but all projects that are now able to use libei and libportal to enable remote control and input capture on non-X desktops (i.e. Wayland, etc). Many others deserve credit, such as @ofourdan and @p12tic for their hard work on improving the forks.

Leave a Comment